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From time to time you read or hear a heartwarming story about a community coming together to help a family pay monstrous medical bills, or people giving up vacation time so a co-worker can receive medical treatment, or some other glurge that is supposed to restore your faith in humanity. These stories are certainly inspiring – but when you peel away the unicorns and rainbows, you find the hideous reality underneath.<\/p>\n
In the United States, GoFundMe is one of the largest health care providers. At least a third of all projects are families begging for help to pay medical bills. And, unfortunately, there are a few fakes out there, which are not always easy to spot.<\/p>\n
What kind of country are we that can spend trillions on defense and billions on tax cuts for mega-corporations and the ultra-wealthy – but blanches at the idea of providing everybody with affordable, if not free, health care and higher education? What kind of country allows insurance companies to d*ck around their customers with weasel words about \u201cexperimental treatments,\u201d \u201cpre-existing conditions,\u201d et cetera? What kind of country lets children go home with \u201cI Need Lunch Money\u201d stamped on their arms? Whoever came up with that last idea could frighten Darth Vader into a dead faint.<\/p>\n
The not-so-great USA is a hellhole of increasing disparity between the rich and poor, where a traffic ticket can balloon into a debt of over $10,000, where people seeking a good education so they can get well-paying jobs instead find themselves saddled with loans that they have scant hope of ever paying off, where millions of people – many of whom have other mouths to feed – are literally one broken arm from the street. People are working multiple jobs but still unable to make ends meet, even though they are pinching pennies until Abraham Lincoln begs for mercy, shopping at thrift stores and subsisting on beans and ramen. Meanwhile, the rich get richer and richer, at the expense of the Little Guy and Gal.<\/p>\n
Stories about people taking heroic measures to help those in need certainly revive one\u2019s faith in humanity, but many of them shouldn\u2019t have happened in the first place. Children should not have to sacrifice their allowances and yard-mowing or lemonade stand money so their classmates can eat – schools should have enough money to provide healthful meals to all students for free. A high school robotics club should not have to construct a special wheelchair for a child with a serious birth defect because the parents\u2019 greedy insurance provider wouldn\u2019t cover even a nickel.<\/p>\n
You\u2019ve probably seen a bumper sticker, T-shirt or button that reads \u201cIt will be a great day when schools have all the funds they need and the Air Force has to hold bake sales in order to buy a bomber.\u201d Our country\u2019s priorities are utterly messed up when providing the rich with tax breaks, buying more weapons, supporting an apartheid regime, and subsidizing industries hostile to the environment are all more important than feeding, educating, housing and medicating the people.<\/p>\n
Stories about people coming to the aid of those who really need it are truly inspiring, and remind me that people are basically good. However, in far too many cases these altruistic acts should not be necessary.<\/p>\n
Here is one list of dystopian horror stories<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From time to time you read or hear a heartwarming story about a community coming together to help a family pay monstrous medical bills, or people giving up vacation time so a co-worker can receive medical treatment, or some other glurge that is supposed to restore your faith in humanity. These stories are certainly inspiring […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44344","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44344"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44344\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}